The Iowa Short Fiction Award has been presented annually since 1969. In 1988 the University of Iowa Press instituted the John Simmons Short Fiction Award—named after the first director of the Press—to complement the ongoing award series. Serious critical consideration is guaranteed by such final judges as Alison Lurie, Raymond Carver, Marilynne Robinson, James Salter, Kevin Brockmeier, and Ethan Canin. Margot Livesey will judge this year's awards.

The author of ten novels, a collection of stories, and a collection of essays on the craft of writing, Margot Livesey has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute, the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, American Short Fiction, and the North American Review, among others, and she is the recipient the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Livesey grew up in Scotland and earned a BA in English and Philosophy at the University of York in England.